Neoextractivism and Indigenous Water Ritual in Salar de Atacama,Chile

Abstract

Latin American governments are neoextractivist: they promote exploitation of natural resources as central to economic development while acting to mitigate some of the excesses of extractive activity. In the space left open by the neoliberal state in the Salar de Atacama in northern Chile, the mining industry creates its own regulatory mechanisms and provides infrastructure and “improvement” projects to indigenous communities. While these projects gain a degree of consent to water extraction and the value of water for development, indigenous people also resist the neoextractivist project. The contradictions of extractivism-as-development are evident in everyday life and articulated in ritual and cultural practice. We take the example of a ritual and work event, the limpia de canales (canal cleaning), to narrate something of local responses to neoextractivist conditions.

Los gobiernos latinoamericanos son neoextractivistas: promueven la explotación de los recursos naturales como elemento central del desarrollo económico y al mismo tiempo actúan para mitigar algunos de los excesos de la actividad extractiva. En el espacio abandonado por el estado neoliberal en el Salar de Atacama en el norte de Chile, la industria minera crea sus propios mecanismos regulatorios y proporciona infraestructura y proyectos de “mejora” a las comunidades indígenas. Si bien estos proyectos obtienen un grado de consentimiento para la extracción de agua y el valor del agua para el desarrollo, los pueblos indígenas también se resisten al proyecto neoextractivista. Las contradicciones del extractivismo como desarrollo son evidentes en la vida cotidiana y se articulan en la práctica ritual y cultural. Tomamos el ejemplo de un evento ritual y laboral, la limpia de canales, para narrar algo de las respuestas locales a las condiciones neoextractivistas.

Keywords

Neoextractivism Mining Water Atacameño peoples

Mining provides approximately 12 percent of Chile’s gross domestic product, almost all from copper, and more than half the copper mined in Chile comes from the Antofagasta region (Comisión Chilena de Cobre, 2016: 19, 65, 99). The demand for water increased dramatically in the mining region of Antofagasta during the 1990s, when the boom in copper began. By 2015 a combination of industrial, political, and ecological factors had led to broad-based declarations from local and indigenous communities, environmental nongovernmental organizations, authorities in the Chilean government, and even mining companies of the need to preserve aquifers and scarce surface waters in the region. A publicly recognized “water crisis” had become apparent, but significant inequalities in access to water and large-scale extraction for mining continued.

Chile’s contemporary political economy is neoextractivist (Gudynas, 2012); it has many characteristics of the historically developmentalist states of Latin America that have relied on unrelenting exploitation of nature in the name of national economic benefits. Gudynas’s notion sets out the contradictions in the program whereby progressive governments incorporate regulatory mechanisms that purport to compensate peoples and environments for the excesses of extraction while seeking to sustain extraction-led economic gains. Most significant to the contradictory conditions of neoextractivism for this paper is that resource extraction often occurs on indigenous lands and benefits least those who experience its negative impacts. As Bebbington et al. (2008: 9) argue, Chile is “one of the banner countries [in Latin America] for the ‘mining leads to development’ argument.” However, mining-associated water extraction and the policy landscape in Chile have enabled extraction and consumption of water by national and global interests with few effective regulatory mechanisms to mitigate their environmental and social impacts (see also Bauer, 2004; Budds, 2010; Oyarzún and Oyarzún, 2011). The resulting inequalities in access to water and contests over environmental and social impacts involving indigenous peoples, other local communities, and the mining industry characterize political and economic relations in the North (e.g., Carrasco, 2016; Castro-Lucic, 2002; Prieto, 2015). In this paper we demonstrate that neoextractivism in Chile relies on industry-led development programs that play a direct and indirect “compensatory” role, especially in the absence of effective state regulation. We begin by describing water demands for resource extraction and changes in state regulation of environmental and social impacts since the 1990s. Our account of extraction and its contemporary political economic dynamics around the Salar de Atacama shows how water and compensation for water extraction both sustain and threaten extractivism-as-development.

Indigenous people respond to the conditions of neoextractivism in a variety of ways. An annual communal work and ritual activity relating to water practiced in two Atacameño (indigenous) communities reveals much about the dynamics of these responses.¹ In Camar and Peine the work and ritual undertaken during the cleaning of the irrigation ditches enact key elements of Atacameño customary practice that are partly state-recognized. The state legally recognizes some indigenous territory and associated water rights, though recognition is subject to other property regimes (see Yáñez and Molina, 2011). And while rights to land and water are important, Andean irrigation practices also articulate a relation to earth and water through the ritual engagement with a productive and responsive landscape (Boelens and Gelles, 2005; Li, 2015). While state laws partly recognize rights to land and water, they only partly recognize the way these rights are exercised by indigenous people (Babidge, 2016). As de la Cadena has argued with regard to Andean Peru, the state may recognize cultural difference, but indigenous practice is “in excess” of notions of cultural difference that rely on notions of belief. Instead, the relation in practice between people and their territories instantiates and constitutes radical difference in what the world is (de la Cadena 2015). In this paper we are less interested in ontological difference than in the political contours of an event. In Atacameño water ritual and work, people’s orientation both against and toward an extractivist ethic is articulated. What is important is how Atacameño people resist, negotiate with, and endure the contradictory conditions of neoextractivist development.

Our argument brings together the results of two comparative ethnographic investigations in the Salar de Atacama, where several resource-extraction companies are operating. We focus in this article on Camar and Peine, indigenous communities adjacent to the Salar. In Camar during 2013, Bolados participated in major festivities and undertook detailed analysis of archival and documentary material relating to water and mineral extraction and their history in the region. This research was part of a project investigating the impacts of mining and tourism on the communities and resources of the Salar. Research by Babidge in Peine since 2010 focusing on engagements between Atacameño people and surrounding mining operations included participant observation in daily life, festivals, communal work, agricultural and water irrigation practices, and community meetings. Field research was undertaken there for periods ranging from two weeks to five months between 2010 and 2015. Separately, we interviewed Atacameño leaders in these and other communities (Socaire, Talabre, Toconao, and San Pedro de Atacama) and mining company officials and government authorities in the broader region.

Extractions and Compensations: Rights, Protections, and their Limits

A legal framework imposed by the military regime in the 1970s, consolidated in the early 1980s, and largely retained by the democratic governments into the present has aimed to build a Chilean economy through the extraction and export of commodities.² Copper mining flourished, buoyed by laws that gave preference to national and transnational mining operations. With democratization in the 1990s, Chile introduced multicultural, heritage, and environmental policies. As it sought to enter the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, this new legislation represented a nation with social and market conditions that met global liberal expectations (Tecklin, Bauer, and Prieto, 2011). But while reforms resulted in changes to relations between the state and corporations and a post-dictatorship citizenry (Paley, 2001), the legal and economic structures that privileged corporate access to water and territory as against indigenous and other community access remained in place (Barton, Román, and Fløysand, 2012; Latta and Cid Aguayo, 2012; Svampa and Antonelli, 2010).

The legal conditions outlined above opened the Salar de Atacama to extractive industries that have been nourished by their capacity to extract water with little regulation. Data compiled from the Dirección General de Aguas (Chilean Water Authority—DGA) show a leap in water rights conceded in the 1990s and a reduction in recent years reflecting protective legislation enacted by the state, conservation action by other bodies, and resistance by communities (Table 1).³ Extraction rights are granted as “permanent and continuous,” however, meaning that they are protected by the Water Code and are cumulative.

Table 1

Rights to Water Extraction in Annual Average Flow (liters per second), 1970–2016

Date	AntofagastaRegion	Salar de Atacama
1970–1979	750	0
1980–1989	5,997	867
1990–1999	7,353	2,557
2000–2009	7,859	1,811
2010–2016	1,898	965

Source: DGA (2016).

At approximately the same time as the expansion of extractive activity on the Salar de Atacama, the region began to be recognized as having tourism and conservation potential. In 1990 the National System of State Protected Areas identified an area in the cordillera above the Salar as the National Flamingo Reserve, and in 2002 it was declared a tourist interest zone. Chile’s Indigenous Law of 1993 introduced a series of regulations relating to indigenous lands and waters, and in 2005 further legal protection of ancestral rights to water held by Aymara and Atacameño communities in the northern desert regions was introduced. In accordance with these legal prerogatives, some tribunals have found in favor of indigenous communities against extractors (for example, in the case of Toconce, see Yáñez and Molina, 2008). Nonetheless, in the Salar, rights to extract water have been granted by the DGA throughout the mid-to-late 1990s and into the twenty-first century in areas that are subject to environmental protection or claimed by indigenous communities.

Chile introduced its first environmental legislation in 1994. Inherent ambiguities regarding the environmental law called for further regulatory changes, which were not effective until 2001 (Latta and Cid Aguayo, 2012). New regulations required that an environmental impact assessment be submitted to the government’s Environment Evaluation Services by anyone wishing to launch a new development project. The evaluation system is full of problems ( Yáñez and Molina, 2011: 161–181) that mirror those in internationally comparable contexts (O’Faircheallaigh, 2010) but demonstrate particular Chilean dynamics reflecting the fact of private ownership of water.⁴

The Salar de Atacama was the focal point of a key struggle over extraction rights that highlighted the area in the national imaginary and tested the strength of environmental and indigenous-recognition laws. In 2007, community and environmentalist opposition rose against the Pampa Colorada project proposed by Minera Escondida/BHP Billiton, in which more than 1,000 liters of water per second were to be extracted in the cordillera above the Salar (Bolados, 2014). In 2009, proposed reactivation of geothermic exploration in the El Tatio Geysers (farther north along the cordillera and also above the Salar de Atacama) provoked widespread protest. The Tatio conflict generated international attention on ecological grounds and at least partly because of its significance as a tourist destination (Bolados, 2014; Pierce, Malin, and Figueroa, 2012).

Mobilization of different groups and communities during these conflicts heightened awareness of the negative impacts of the mining industry and was enabled by the spirit if not the letter of the 1990 laws and stronger protections since then.⁵ The public prominence of local resistance also challenged the national discourse extolling the benefit of extractivist development and low impact on the Salar and local peoples. Most recently, the Peine Atacameño community rejected a proposal by Minera Delfín to mine copper near Peine partly on the basis of community concerns about the potential impact on underground water sources and other environmental and social effects. The company completed an environmental impact assessment, but after several attempts at community consultation the proposal was rejected. While regional authorities upheld the community’s decision (Comisión de Evaluación, 2016), the Committee of Ministers in Santiago reopened the process of community consultation (see Ochoa Burgueño, 2017), and the outcome is not yet clear.

The state legislation outlined above was intended to amend and substantially correct the impacts of unbridled mining activity. While indigenous communities have resisted proposed resource extraction in the cases discussed, using the new legislation as support, resistance is not the only Atacameño response to resource extraction. Water is the cultural and economic base from which communities negotiate their participation in the political economy of the region. Community leaders negotiate with mining companies for financial assistance and support in building local water and other infrastructure, and community members set up businesses that rely on local water rights to take advantage of an itinerant labor force in the mining industry or tourism circuits. Water for the community and local businesses is the source of leverage in dealings with the mining industry and the state. Atacameño peoples employ state-focused tactics to retain indigenous territories and waters, especially in relation to new threats to their resources, while they engage with existing extractive activities in ways that are locally rationalized.

Extractivism as Development

A recent survey of almost 1,600 Chilean citizens and their perceptions of the mining industry found that Chileans considered mining a “central and necessary economic pillar” for the nation despite a “lack of faith that formal institutions are sufficient” to mitigate its impacts (Moffatt et al., 2014: 7, 11). Corporate social responsibility programs, corporate-led community development projects, and the politics of sustainability have begun to govern the ethical dimensions of business and social investment in Chile (Beckman, Colwell, and Cunningham, 2009) as elsewhere in the world (Dolan and Rajak, 2016; Owen and Kemp, 2012). In a region where the business of copper and lithium extraction demands and consumes the significant majority of energy, water, and territory, mining companies use community programs to manage public perceptions and keep social contest low. Indigenous communities have come to expect and demand more.

Four main extractive companies have operations that affect the physical environment of the southern end of the Salar de Atacama, including the territories of the Atacameño communities of Peine and Camar (Figure 1): Minera Escondida Limitada (MEL, operated by BHP Billiton), Compañía Minera Zaldívar (CMZ, operated by Antofagasta Minerals and partly owned by Barrick Gold), SQM (formerly Soquimich), and Rockwood (formerly Sociedad Chilena de Litio).

Figure 1.

The Antofagasta region.

The latter two are nonmetal extractors operating on the Salar de Atacama itself. MEL and CMZ have open-cut copper mines in the mountains to the south of the Salar but extract significant quantities of water from underground sources linked to the scant surface water on the southern end of the Salar de Atacama. Rights to underground water resources in the south of the Salar are concentrated in the hands of these four transnational companies and minor Chilean interests that dwarf water rights registered by the Atacameño communities of Peine and Camar (Table 2). Corporate social and environmental responsibility programs build local infrastructure, provide regional jobs, establish agreements for service provision by local operators, and promise compensation if their self-regulation efforts are unsuccessful. For these reasons we understand corporate activity as parallel to the compensatory activity of the neoextractivist state.

Table 2

Rights to Water Extraction (liters per second) in the Southern Salar de Atacama of Principal Extractors and Indigenous Communities

Company or Community	L/s
Minera Escondida Limitada S/N^a	1,473.4
Minera Utah de Chile Inc.^a	304.0
Compañía Minera Zaldívar Limitada	625.3
Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile SQM^b	4.0
SQM Salar S.A.^b	309.0
Sociedad Chilena de Litio Ltda.	8.5
Rockwood Litio Ltda.	15.0
Total	2,739.2
Comunidad Atacameña de Camar	26.6
Comunidad Atacameña de Peine	65.6
Total	92.2

Source: DGA (2016).

. BHP Billiton.

. SQM.

Rockwood (Lithium) has been majority-owned by a North American corporation (Albemarle) since 2014. Since the Chilean Advancement Corporation began operating in the 1970s, El Litio (as it is locally known) has provided employment to many Atacameño men. In 2015, 70 of its 117 workers were indigenous, and many lived in Peine (Rockwood community relations worker, interview, San Pedro de Atacama, November 10, 2015). It has enjoyed a stable relationship with the community of Peine; camps for workers and contractors are located on community land, water for domestic purposes is provided from community sources, and a largely compliant (nonunionized) workforce is made up of local men. In return, the community of Peine has had an informal understanding with the company that roads would be maintained, electricity supplied (at cost from the company’s diesel generator) and ad hoc cultural, health, educational, and other financial support provided. In 2014 Rockwood and Peine signed a formal agreement of cooperation, sustainability, and mutual benefit, marking a shift in the basis of business and local relations.⁶ Rockwood plans to expand its operations significantly in the coming years.

SQM began developing its operations in 1993.⁷ It began to produce “sustainability reports” in 2010, and in 2014 it reported that it had a range of relationships of “mutual benefit” with indigenous community organizations on the eastern side of the Salar. One of these is the indigenous community of Camar, and SQM has five wells for water extraction that are directly adjacent to Camar’s claimed territory. SQM has also signed an agreement with the Chilean National Parks authority and its “neighbor,” the Atacameño community of Toconao, to co-manage a protected area on the Salar, Laguna Chaxa (SQM, 2014: 10–12).⁸

MEL, one of the highest-producing copper mines in the world, is operated by a majority-Australian multinational, BHP Billiton. It employs few Atacameño people but has long-standing policies relating to social and environmental sustainability (see MEL, 2014). In 1997 it signed a legal agreement with Peine to provide financial benefits, community development support, and local infrastructure projects (renewed in 2007). The Minera Escondida Foundation is a separate philanthropic body that operates community projects throughout the region and the nation.

CMZ has extractive rights to water in the same zones of the Salar as MEL, but they were granted before environmental legislation was introduced. The most recent available report by Antofagasta Minerals (2015) gives no statistics on water extraction for its five copper operations in Chile, of which CMZ was the last acquired, in early 2015. CMZ’s ongoing extraction and limited reporting represent some of the barriers to addressing the problem of privately held water extraction rights where these rights were granted before regulatory legislation came into force.

MEL and CMZ together have more than 80 percent of the water extraction rights on the Salar (DGA, 2010: 99), and most of this water is drawn from subterranean aquifers in the Monturaqui area. In response to reporting requirements relating to extractive rights granted since the 1990s, MEL has created its own environmental regulatory mechanism.⁹ It is also building a desalination plant near Antofagasta, which is intended to replace extraction from subterranean sources, but according to MEL’s director of corporate affairs, transporting desalinated water “over 3,000 meters [above sea level] and 180 kilometers away makes it six times more expensive than water from the aquifer” (interview, Antofagasta, November 4, 2015). With projections of sustained growth, the company has indicated that it will continue to extract water from the Salar.

While indigenous communities have no legally recognized rights to water in subterranean aquifers, the environmental laws outlined above protect wetlands in indigenous territories that are fed by these waters. However, these partial legal protections exist only in relation to corporate extraction rights that were conceded after the environmental and indigenous laws of the 1990s. Only the granting of new concessions is subject to indigenous community consent. In their desire for future concessions, most mining industry actors attempt to compensate for them with the community financial support, infrastructure, and project activity outlined above. As do the neoextractivist mitigation activities of the state, corporate-funded community development projects and the like represent a symbolic exchange for water.

Atacameño community members and leaders have resisted new extractive activities and demanded more legal protection of existing rights. They have also negotiated with industry for compensatory financial or infrastructural benefits from extraction in their territories. We turn now to examine water ritual and communal work to illustrate how these different dynamics are articulated. Some ritual practice such as addressing sentient nonhuman beings of the territory (with the expectation of response), as described below, may be considered, as in de la Cadena’s formulation, “excess,” not only cultural difference but worldly differences. We agree that there are discernible limits on what is recognized and potentiated in the legislated recognition of indigenous rights. Nevertheless, our ethnographic experiences have encouraged us to consider the ritual and work event of the cleaning of the canals as an articulation of Atacameño tactics to endure the contradictory conditions of neoextractivism rather than a lens on the nature of ontological difference.

Customary Water Work and Ritual as Politics

People in the villages at the southern end of the Salar de Atacama work together in the annual cleaning of the irrigation ditches, which culminates in a ritual known as Talatur. The anthropologist Grete Mostny (1954: 162–164) described the ritual as beginning with an invocation in Kunza¹⁰ of the places where water appears—springs, pools, and rocks—and the protector-mountains (mallkus), companions and witnesses to daily life and the work of earth and animals. At the time of Mostny’s research, the territory was being reintegrated into the national imaginary as part of the development politics associated with the frontier. Many years later it was claimed that “in Peine, Camar, Talabre, Toconao, and the town of San Pedro de Atacama, they no longer celebrate local traditional festivals because the department of irrigation (the Minister of Public Works) took over the management of the canals” (Matus, 1993: 68). In fact, local festivals were not eliminated. As Eliana¹¹ told us, her parents’ generation “really worshipped water,” and while there have been many changes in the way people relate to water (see Núñez, 1998), in Peine and Camar the cleaning of the canals and the associated ritual have never ceased and in fact in recent years have experienced some resurgence.

Matías, who leads the cleaning of the canals in Peine, explained that its meaning is a request of the world and the ancestors that rains continue to fall and waters continue to flow from the springs (interview, Peine, July 2014). After the ceremony in Camar a community leader (interview, Camar, October 2013) said that the Talatur meant

singing to the earth, singing to the mountain peaks, singing to the spring, to the water, it relates to everything, [it’s] an acknowledgment. . . . I think the canal cleaning is never going to disappear. It is a strong conservation of the lands themselves, the terraces that people own, so it is never going to disappear. It affirms the community and it affirms its terrain, because when you don’t work the land it loses the blessing of its water. . . . While you may have rights you still have to pay to return the water to its lands.

Communal labor and ritual are burdens and civic virtues (see Harris, 2007) that articulate responsibilities, rights, and reciprocity in terms of water, community membership, and landownership. In the canal cleaning Atacameño communal labor produces relations to water and territory by means of an ongoing connection with cosmological forces and political relations with other landowners.

Canal Cleaning in Camar and Peine

Camar and Peine have resident populations of about 60 and about 400 respectively, but many community members are residentially mobile and the towns expand at the time of festivals and during school vacations. The annual canal cleaning is an occasion when community members who live in major regional towns for education, work, and other reasons return. They perform ritual obligations, spend time with family, and avoid accusations by other community members, light-hearted or serious, of having abandoned their neighbors, their hereditary gardens, and their ancestral lands.

In Peine, three days are set aside to undertake the work, a day’s rest is scheduled to follow, and then two full days are set aside for the cleaning of canals in Tilomonte, an agricultural oasis approximately 15 kilometers south. In Camar the work begins with a ritual “payment” that seeks to secure good relations with the ancestors, the earth (Pachamama), and the mallkus. In Camar in 2013, the leader of this ritual was a patriarch of what was considered one of the founding families. For many years, he had been the ritual specialist (cantal) for the Talatur in the neighboring community of Socaire. (Ties of kinship and historical compadrazgo among those from neighboring Socaire, Peine, Camar, and Talabre are common, and neighbors perform these rituals in similar ways.) In Peine, decisions about how the work will proceed have for some years been made by a man with long-standing administrative and ritual knowledge of the practice. He announces the details of the work that must be undertaken, the legal status of the different plots of land fed by sectors of the irrigation canals, the role of the “captains,” and the preparation of the festive meal on the third day. In both Camar and Peine, the cleaning of the canals begins at the bottom of the irrigated area and works upward to finish at the source of the town’s main spring waters.

After the opening oblations to the beings of water, earth, and mountains, a roll call of those who use the land marks the beginning of physical work.¹² In Peine, the roll is a register of agricultural plots that is decades old, so the names that are called out often refer to the grandparent or other relative of the worker. The roll call in each sector designates where a worker is positioned in the line, and landowners (or the day laborers they have engaged for the task) work alongside those whose inherited fields adjoin their own. Those not present at the roll call are assigned tasks to be completed later or cash fines. Non-Atacameños are also present from time to time.¹³ In Peine in 2011 a few non-Atacameño miners worked for the families of women with whom they lived or as laborers for Atacameño friends. Long-term employees of El Litio who have married local women wield shovels every year for the land and gardens they and their families own. In differing ways, each outsider’s labor is harnessed to new and old relationships within the community and to the land and water. Every worker present works for land, water, and landowners in Peine and for their right to take water in the canals that feed their gardens and lands and thus sustain their families and herds.

In Peine in 2011, during rest stops, community leaders made speeches about the importance of the work, and Don Matías invited workers to make offerings with and drink from the small jug of aloja (an alcoholic drink made from the seed pods of the native algarroba). The president of the community council, laden with beer, wine, soft drinks, and coca leaf, announced that these gifts signaled the support of his committee. Consuming them and making offerings of them on the fields and into the irrigation canals as they went sustained the earth and water, as did the strength and humor of the men and women in the work party.

The work ends with the singing of the Talatur at the highest reservoir of the community, near the source, where the cantal chants the names of the peaks that rise around the Salar. He stands facing the peaks and the workers and blesses the ground and those present with a mixture including aloja and the ground grains of the previous year’s harvest. The chanting asks the mountain peaks, the earth, and the water for good rains, a bountiful harvest, and strong herds of animals. When the Talatur is over, young men and women customarily enter Peine’s main reservoir together in a frolicking immersion that links their bodies directly to community desires for crop and animal fertility in the coming year.

During the work in Camar in 2013, most were dressed in clothes bearing mining company insignia, an indication of the practicality of the clothing as well as the availability of mining work for many local people at one time or another. Emigration to Calama for work and education opportunities is common, but some community members stay to work in the nearby mines. At the opening of the canal cleaning in Camar, the cantal and others asked to be forgiven for absences during the year. As in Peine, people were playful and made jokes during the work, consumed food and drink along the way, and chewed coca leaf (Figure 2). As the day drew to an end, Camar’s president began to complain about day laborers who had deserted their work and landowners who had not fulfilled all of their obligations, implicitly raising questions about their rights to water—pointing to unpaid debts that called for efforts to make amends in relations with neighbors, the earth, and the ancestors.

Figure 2.

Canal cleaning in Camar. (Photo P. Bolados)

Since the 2007 Pampa Colorada conflict, representatives of MEL’s social performance team have consistently sought to improve their relations with Peine. In 2011 three employees of the company attended the final stages of the canal cleaning with the president’s permission. Camar, which has begun to seek to regain traditional pastures linked to hydrological resources of the Salar and pursue the acquisition of basic services from the government, has also begun to engage directly with SQM regarding the provision of infrastructure and other support. In 2013 the canal cleaning in Camar ended with a communal feast that was financially supported by SQM and during which the community invited the mining company to consider relations on community terms.

Community members’ participation in water work and ritual demonstrates their belonging to the community, their rights to their lands, their rights to water for them, and their responsibility to look after the land. More broadly, it expresses their rights and responsibilities to the earth and water as beings. In contributing their labor, they perform their hereditary ownership of particular plots and, by extension, their responsibility for the broader territory. Their labor articulates resistance to the values of extractivism through the logic that communal work practice produces Atacameño rights to and responsibility for water. Not only do community members project an image of themselves in traditional form (which is important for state recognition of their rights to water) but the ritual itself is an instrumental and symbolic staging of the question to what extent an extractivist future serves them. The articulation of belonging, negotiation, and responsibility constitutes a challenge to the dominant extractivist framing of the Salar.

Concluding Comments

The president of the regional indigenous community council described the contemporary situation on the Salar in terms of the struggle between David and Goliath (interview, San Pedro de Atacama, October 2012). He may have been thinking about the experience of confronting a heterogeneous body of national legislation that has contradictory principles with regard to recognition and protection of the community and the environment and the rights of extraction. State regulations have not extended much protection over the lands and waters of the communities of the Salar de Atacama. Mitigation and compensation are largely left to the resource extraction companies that engage in negotiations with Atacameño communities and leaders. The idea that territory and water are “resources” to be managed for “sustainable” profit that would be shared with locally impacted communities has been a powerful development narrative. While communities have engaged in negotiations with water extractors over financial and other benefits, neither Chilean law nor corporate compensation is satisfactorily protecting people’s rights or the environment.

For Atacameño communities of the Salar, canal cleaning and the Talatur have the cosmological import of engaging with water as a potent spiritual force and continuing an annual event about community belonging, rights, and responsibilities. They may also be understood as an externally focused corrective to extractivist development that potentially exhausts water and an internally focused dialogue that seeks to temper indigenous negotiations with extractors and local commercial interests by maintaining relations among customary landowners and with otherworldly forces. In their revival and continuation, the work and ritual articulate territoriality, define water as a social and spiritual substance, and narrate the relationship of water as a substance to community processes and external forces. Atacameño water ritual and labor that engage with broader politics are not the only indigenous political practice to do so, and their political orientation does not exhaust their meaning.

Footnotes

Notes

Sally Babidge is an anthropologist and senior lecturer at the University of Queensland. Paola Bolados is an anthropologist in the Social Work School at the Universidad de Valparaiso. They thank the community members from Camar and Peine who permitted them to undertake research with and in their communities and those they interviewed elsewhere in the region. They also thank Matthew Harris, who made the map. The research was made possible by the support of the School of Social Science and the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University of Queensland, the Universidad de Valparaiso, an Australian Research Council Grant (DP#1094069), and a grant from the Chilean Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (#8120062).

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